history
From surviving on wild plants and game to controlling our world with technology, humanity’s journey of progress is a story of expanding human agency.
A perfect map is as useless as it is impossible to create.
An analysis of Indonesian cave paintings is reframing the history of human art, though whether the paintings really were created by human hands remains an open question.
Cats twist and snakes slide, exploiting and negotiating physical laws. Scientists are figuring out how.
Alan Turing and Christopher Strachey created a ground-breaking computer program that allowed them to express affection vicariously when so doing publicly, as gay men, was criminal.
19 rooms. 1,636 square feet. 1,800 years of history.
9 minutes of cruel history may cure the anti-progress delusion.
The true story of the shot that “reverberated through England” when science collided head-on with religion.
Ryan Condal, who worked in pharmaceutical advertising before Hollywood, talks with Big Think about imposter syndrome, “precrastination,” and Westeros lore.
While the concept stretches back centuries, it has garnered significant attention in recent decades.
The world needs a moral defense of progress based in humanism and agency.
A new method of mapping migration factors in erratic movements and changing climate.
In “Moral Ambition,” Dutch historian Rutger Bregman argues that all would benefit from a collective redefinition of success.
Concerns about privacy and pressures regarding the physical appearance of women and their homes contributed to the failure of AT&T’s 1960s Picturephone.
Each year, over half a million migrants cross the deadly jungle separating Colombia from Panama in search of a better life in the United States.
In ancient Sparta, it was accepted practice for more women to marry and have children by more than one man.
Architecture in the age of AI — argues professor Nayef Al-Rodhan — should embed philosophical inquiry in its transdisciplinary toolkit.
God is not a vending machine, but is it wrong to treat him like one?
Misinterpreted data may be distorting Western predictions about the future of China’s economy.
How (not) to end up in the ash heap of history.
Because of their large and unfriendly neighbor to the east, the Baltics would rather be Scandinavian.
The burial spot was found in one of the Herculaneum scrolls charred by Mt. Vesuvius.
“I believe that in the future, there will be a Francis Bacon of AI art,” Saltz tells Big Think. “We just haven’t seen that artist yet.”
Author A.J. Jacobs explores how voting has changed since the days of the Founding Fathers — for better and for worse.
If the past is any guide, things are going to take off quickly.
The fellowship’s journey through Middle-earth mirrors the modernization of the English countryside.
Digital analyses of Enlightenment-era letters are teaching us a thing or two about Locke, Voltaire, and others.
A poignant, 2,000-year-old burial in northern Italy could be the latest evidence of an ancient friendship.
Consumer debt shapes American lives so thoroughly that it seems eternal and immortal, but it’s actually relatively new to the financial world.
Japanese thought can’t be easily characterized by just a few books — but this essential guide is a great place to start.